He had his guys as has your President.

And that is what concerns me. I’m from Germany btw - it feels almost like a flashback from history class.

It is for now…

You think Hitler was the mastermind behind the German reich?

I’m aware.

What I am concerned about is whether undesirable citizens will soon simply “disappear,” as is the case in Russia, for example.

All good points, but I’m not at all sure that will matter. These things are only relevant if there are still elections.

Here are a few points that suggest to me that Drump is planning to turn the US into a dictatorship where there will be no more elections.

• It is an open secret that Drump is preparing to declare himself president again or again be candidate in a mock-election (Putin regularly gets elected as well), which would be a violation of the Constitution.
• After his last term in office, he already attempted a coup, which, as you say, was not punished as such.
• He is building up a secret police force through (barely) hidden tax increases in the form of ubiquitous tariffs – namely the ICA, which he is staffing exclusively with loyal followers.
• He (and his followers, who cannot hope for impunity via the “the President is king” Supreme Court decision) are already disregarding applicable law and court decisions. It’s unlikely that they would do that in such a manner if they would fear to be prosecuted once a new administration comes along (they would be because what they do is so brazenly illegal).
• He is already persecuting political opponents (such as the judges who convicted the January 6 insurrectionists).
• He openly calls for the persecution of dissidents, including among the civilian population (most recently Bruce Springsteen, for example).
• He has already brought the media (both traditional and, in particular, social media) into line, as evidenced by the completely inadequate coverage of the massive 50501 protests, to name just one example among many.
• Even without the unlimited powers granted to the president by the Supreme Court, the US system is highly vulnerable to a coup by the incumbent government due to the concentration of power in the hands of the president (he is commander-in-chief of the army, can declare a state of emergency and is then also commander of the police and National Guard etc.).

The list goes on – even though Drump has only been in office for six months. If this continues, and I am convinced it will, the government will soon make civil resistance impossible – as in Russia, where by no means everyone is a Putin supporter, but his opponents have been silenced by force.

Of course, I don’t want to paint a picture of doom and gloom, but unfortunately I am honestly convinced that Drump wants to replace what little democracy still exists in the United States with a dictatorship. And he is not even doing it by himself - I think he is just a straw man for the guys pulling the strings (the one percent who all support him).

I completely agree with you except for one thing: I don’t think things will get better – at least not on their own. On the contrary, I think the situation will actually get much worse, because I believe that US institutions have long been infiltrated, as exemplified by the Supreme Court’s absurd ruling that the president is above the law. This has, in my opinion, nothing to do with democracy anymore.

Nevertheless, I wish you all the best and am keeping my fingers crossed for all the good and decent US citizens.

Edit: I’m from Germany and I post things like this because of our history, which is well known in the US too. Don’t do as we did back then, act while you still can!

Another appropriate word that comes to mind is traitors.

I see, the land of the free. It’s really a a great democracy you’ve got going over there.

Drump is even worse in that regard, or am I mistaken? I think he’s worse in every regard imaginable.

This US administration is truly a danger to the entire world.

Could you please finally lock Drump and his henchmen up for all their crimes and put some halfway decent people in their place?

For a devout Christian, this could seem like God’s punishment for misdeeds that society has allowed to go unpunished; for rational people, it looks more like the consequences of unbridled greed at the expense of the environment.

Either way, there will be much more of this in the future.

Yesterday, I finally talked my parents into canceling MS356 and switching to LibreOffice and Thunderbird.

Now, the excessive subscription fees for MS365 goes to them instead.

If Microsoft keeps this up, I might even manage to persuade them to switch to Linux at some point.

Well, even if it was a patriotic song, Springsteen was first. And he is a good guy - especially compared to those morons.

Yes, Born in the USA is by no means a patriotic anthem, but rather a critical song about the miserable situation of veterans and workers in the US. The MAGA people are just too stupid to understand that.

Springsteen has repeatedly criticized the fact that the song is being misused in this way and has long been a vocal critic of Drump.

It has become abundantly clear that the US is now run by organized crime. How else can one describe all this?

The word you are looking for is probably “Niemandsvorbild,” which means “nobody’s role model”.

It is a made-up word that is apparently sometimes attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, but it probably wasn’t coined by him. It doesn’t actually exist in the German language, but it is still easy to understand.

More common would be “Negativ-Vorbild” (“negativ role model”) or “Antiheld” (“antihero”), although the latter describes a likable but imperfect protagonist in a work of fiction.

There is a fundamental difference between traditional media, such as news sites, newspapers, and magazines, and social media, meta, Twitter (X), and so on: Social media platforms do not produce content, but merely host content created by their users.

Although traditional media also earned only a relatively small portion of their profits from subscriptions (around 30-40% from people who paid for the content), the business model of social media is even more ad-driven.

Social media companies earn almost all of their revenue exclusively from ads and PR (public relations, i.e., influencing public opinion — what used to be called propaganda).

What I mean is that meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp…) or any other major social media company even gets paid to promote content provided by someone else.

In traditional media, this was called an advertorial – the only difference is that these hidden advertisements are now even more hidden because they no longer have to be labeled as such (this was required by law for traditional media, but is very easy to circumvent due to the way social media works).

Edit: in other words: if you have the funds, you could run whatever viewpoint you like on social media - but you have to deliver your own content or your own content creator aka influencer (maybe they provide even a copywriter or a face to go with it idk - but that’s extra for sure).

You don’t follow politics?

What I mean by this analogy is that democratic states face a massive problem because voters no longer receive decent information, as they mostly get their news from social media. But these sites do not operate according to the logic of traditional journalism (at least halfway researched stories based on a at least somewhat comprehensible standard concerning truth - quality journalists usually go for “both sides of the medallion”).

Social media works completely differently: it’s not about the value of the information, but just about clicks – and it doesn’t matter whether stories that are sold as “news” actually have any truth to it at all. I mean, you may remember the presidential debate in which Drump was convinced that foreigners eat pets — which, of course, is not true, it’s of course ridiculous, but that orange moron still has fallen victim to social media misinformation (newsflash: he is even US president now).

As a voter, you have no control over how or where your fellow citizens get their information. Unfortunately, they now get it primarily on social media, where not the truth matters but just how you sell your viewpoint - even if it is absolutely ridiculous. That’s why someone like Drump gets away with all his lies – he has simply created his own reality in which what he says is, strangely enough, the truth for his followers.

Yes, they do, but they don’t pay for it; they even get paid for this content.